Life EFFIGE: sustainability in catering

Camst Group is a partner in the European Life Effige project, as part of which it is experimenting with a methodology promoted by the European Commission – PEF: Product Environmental Footprint – that aims to provide effective and transparent measurements of an organization’s environmental footprint. The project’s co-ordinator and technical partner is the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna Management Institute.

Camst is the first catering operator in Europe to start testing this pilot methodology, which has been used to calculate the environmental footprint of a school meals service in all its phases, including choosing and transforming raw materials, defining menus, meal preparation and distribution in school dining facilities.

The project has also involved Camst’s suppliers of three of the products used in its school meal production chain, thus confirming the fundamental importance of encouraging players all along the agri-food chain to act in a spirit of partnership to foster sustainable development.

The specific object under study was the life cycle of the school catering service provided by Camst’s Forlì kitchens in academic 2017-2018.

In this way we were able to identify areas in which to intervene in concrete and positive ways, such as designing sustainable menus that privilege vegetable products to provide a balanced and nutritious diet, replacing plastic plates and, more in general, reducing waste of both food and water during cleaning processes. All this while maintaining high safety standards.

“The road to sustainability starts with awareness of the impact of our business. In this connection, I’d like to mention a project: Life Effige.” – Federico Malaguti, chairman, Camst.